Talent Consumerisation - the impact on succession planning

Consumerisation of talent. This is the change that is happening in the behaviour and attitude to work, employment and careers often seen in those now early in their careers. It's a change that is taking place - right now.

The emergence of the 'career portfolio' has forced organisations to ensure a strong and obvious alignment between their succession planning approach and how talented employees think about careers.

But what does this mean for us working in HR?

We've summarised what we see as the critical implications for HR and Talent professionals.

Talent consumerisation suggests…

This means for us in HR…

Succession planning plans that stretch out beyond 3 years or so into the future may be a waste of time

We need to have more robust, shorter-term plans which may require more system support and better talent analytics and succession planning software due to the changeability of the plans

Organisations are exposed to significant risk and unnecessary cost if their succession planning approach does not include real mobility and career data in their succession planning template

We need to think about whether talented people are working for the right manager as part of succession planning and talent reviews

We need to be able to gather data on engagement, retention, promotion, performance etc. by manager and use it. We need to set clear expectations that inadequate line management will no longer be the only key part of a job that people are allowed to be poor at

That we cannot continue to make assumptions and guesses about individual career aspirations, or exclude them from the conversation. This exposes the organisation to huge risks. We need to measure succession planning differently

We must ensure that we have stress-tested succession plans against different scenarios to understand how robust they are. We need to measure what actually happens, not how many boxes have names in. We need to be able to trust data on career aspirations and mobility

That we need to tie-in succession planning with strategic workforce planning to understand where the key succession risks to business strategy lie, and to understand where a different strategy is needed to address risks

We need to adopt a more contextual and prioritised approach to succession planning – aim to have greater success in focusing on a smaller number of more important succession areas. Need to include data on external talent availability and identify critical roles relative to strategy not manager opinion

You may also like to hear Professor Nick Kemsley talking about this in this video.